[HN Gopher] Windows File Manager (WinFile) repository archived o...
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Windows File Manager (WinFile) repository archived on March 1, 2025
Author : wolpoli
Score : 30 points
Date : 2025-04-22 20:23 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| nashashmi wrote:
| Quite fast. Faster than the current explorer.
| lousken wrote:
| they don't have the expertise? oh right, since it takes 10
| seconds to load a right click context menu on the desktop in w11,
| no wonder /s
| dboreham wrote:
| Only about 1s here. Wasn't the 10 second thing because it was
| looking for a now-absent floppy drive?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It depends on how many shell extensions you have installed.
| How something so basic can drag a supercomputer to its knees
| is puzzling but MS never fails to deliver.
| lifeisgood99 wrote:
| The simplest explanation would be that those shell
| extensions have poor performance.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| One wonders if it would be possible to invoke those
| extensions asynchronously and put a little "loading" icon
| where any new shell items might appear. Or have a hard 2s
| timeout after which any latecomers get shoved behind
| another layer of menus.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They'd probably implement that by launching a new
| Electron process to keep up with the times.
| saratogacx wrote:
| If you turn off animations they ARE loading the menu
| asynchronously. You'll see a basic menu with the
| extensions added on as the menu continues to grow and
| reflow. It's worse if you right click on a file. It also
| DOES use "loading" placeholder text
|
| (e) added the bit about the loading text.
| immibis wrote:
| Its a disease all over software engineering. We add just
| enough layers of abstraction, but no more, to make it about
| ten times slower than a Commodore 64. The excuse is that
| it's to avoid having to think end-to-end as one human can't
| possibly think end-to-end these days. The reality is the
| reason they can't is because of all these useless
| indirection layers in the middle and if those were deleted,
| they could.
| rep_lodsb wrote:
| That's still _billions_ of CPU instructions being run. If you
| spent the rest of your life locked in some Tibetan monastery,
| going through all the steps by hand on paper, you wouldn 't
| even get 1% of the way to rendering this single context menu.
|
| The amount of bloat in modern software is simply obscene.
| babypuncher wrote:
| 1 second is still an order of magnitude too long. Windows XP
| context menus were much snappier, on much weaker hardware.
| And XP was rather notorious for being bloated and slow at the
| time of its release...
|
| Right clicks on my MacBook are perceptually instantaneous.
| Yakomonaketo wrote:
| I think it's mostly because of the many registry entries like
| context shell handlers
| userbinator wrote:
| Good. There wasn't much that needed changing anyway, it was
| nearly perfect as-is.
| jug wrote:
| True, probably pretty feature complete after all these years
| although a pretty major lacking feature for any serious use is
| no UNC path support.
| tiahura wrote:
| MS hate aside, Windows 11 Explorer is a thing of beauty.
| 7bit wrote:
| The Windows 11 Explorer is also buggy as shit. They still
| haven't solved the issue where folders within the Download
| folder randomly enable grouping again. Or you know, where you
| could click on the address bar and see the full path to the
| download folder, instead you see the word Download. Great
| fucking Job. They butchered the W10 explorer, painted it gold,
| and tapped themselves on the shoulder.
| SirFatty wrote:
| Well, and added tabs, which is really the best part.
| Lammy wrote:
| I have that on Windows 10 for all applications instead of
| just Explorer: https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/
| userbinator wrote:
| Hell no. There's already a taskbar --- although that's
| another thing they've managed to screw up in Win11.
| pests wrote:
| There is a setting (maybe on by default?) you just click in
| the location bar and it turns back into an editble text field
| like normal.
| 7bit wrote:
| > We realize this may come as a shock and disappointment to our
| contributors but we simply do not have the expertise or resources
| within the organization to continue to maintain this project.
|
| Resources ... Okay. What truly comes as a shock is the fact that
| Microsoft says they don't have expertise to continue this
| project. I mean, who is building Windows then? It's the same
| building blocks, no?!
| whatever1 wrote:
| They pretty much say that the company gutted their team to the
| point they cannot support the project anymore.
|
| Given the latest layoff rounds there is also good chance that
| indeed they fired the people who had the expertise on this.
| generalpf wrote:
| Who would _want_ to work on this thing? It hasn 't been a
| standard part of Windows for at least a decade.
| jujube3 wrote:
| > I mean, who is building Windows then?
|
| Armies of H1Bs frantically copying and pasting from Stack
| Overflow until something compiles.
| userbinator wrote:
| These days it's more likely to be AI, possibly Microsoft's
| own Copilot.
| Dwedit wrote:
| The control used is a ListBox, and not a ListView, because we're
| dealing with pre-Windows 95 software here. As a consequence, you
| can't use Ctrl+Arrow Keys to move the selection, and Space to
| toggle selection for a file. Yet you can ctrl+click files.
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(page generated 2025-04-22 23:01 UTC)